Photography collector Gordon Bennett dies

OBITUARY

Updated 11:02 pm, Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Gordon Bennett, a Marin County flea market shopper who ended up with a photography collection worth millions, has died at 79, at an assisted living facility in Oakwood, Ga.

Mr. Bennett, who lived in Kentfield for many years, succumbed to his sixth heart attack on Nov. 25, according to Joyce Branch, his first cousin.

Over the course of 50 years, starting around 1960, Mr. Bennett amassed a holding that ranged from rare Carleton Watkins prints to anonymous family photo albums. To his eye, the everyday pictures were as important, if not as marketable, as the works of the famous.

Eight years ago, Mr. Bennett donated his collection of more than 1,000 pictures, ranging from tintypes to snapshots, to SFMOMA and they are regularly shown in "Picturing Modernity," the ongoing display of work from the permanent collection. Thanks to this gift, vernacular photography is a strength of the collection at SFMOMA, Phillips said.

LATEST SFGATE VIDEOS

"He had a particularly keen eye for uncelebrated photographs, meaning those not by well-known artists," said Jeffrey Fraenkel of Fraenkel Gallery, the prominent photography dealer in San Francisco. "Some of the vernacular pictures that he bought and eventually gave to SFMOMA are simply astonishing."

As a street photographer, his work was good enough to be in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, SFMOMA and the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, but his eye for the work of others overshadowed it. "His stature will be properly recognized in the coming years," said Robert Flynn Johnson, retired graphic arts curator for the Fine Arts Museums.

In 1960 he enrolled at San Francisco State College to work toward his master's in art with a photography emphasis. His first class was "Beginning Photography," and that started it.

"I began exploring antique shops and shows, and bought every example of nineteenth century photography I could afford," he later wrote in a catalog essay. "I spent my vacations looking for photographs. I was collecting on a student's budget, and I was amazed that I could purchase so inexpensively these early and important examples of a new art form."

Mr. Bennett came to be known as "the Tennessee Horse Trader," and in 1967 he made the trade of a lifetime. Rummaging through the bottom shelves of a used book store on Sutter Street, he happened upon 76 large plate prints, each labeled with the name of the photographer, Carleton Watkins.

Since Watkins was not yet known, the bookstore owner traded the set, 40 from Yosemite and 36 from the California missions, for some artworks from the Philippines and East India.

Six years later, the Focus Gallery on Union Street exhibited all 76, priced at $500 each. None of them sold. In need of funds to meet his mortgage payment, Mr. Bennett later sold the mission collection to UCLA. He hung on to the Yosemite stuff until the time was right, which was in April 2004.

In an auction at Sotheby's New York, the collection raised a total of $1.93 million. One of the $500 pictures, titled "Agassiz Rock and the Yosemite Falls, from Union Point" sold for $310,400, to Fraenkel, who purchased it on behalf of the J. Paul Getty Museum.

"He had a feel and an ability to sniff these things out," said Fraenkel.

That same year, he made his donation to SFMOMA. But he never stopped looking for pictures.

"He had the collecting gene," said Denise Bethel, director of the Photographs Department at Sotheby's New York, who visited with Mr. Bennett when she was in Georgia in September. She spoke with him by phone just last week, after he had received the catalog for Sotheby's December photographs auction.

"We had our usual wonderful conversation about the photographs in the sale," Bethel said. "He loved seeing what was coming up in the market."

Mr. Bennett never married. He is survived by several cousins in the South. No services are planned.

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.